All articles from Noema

The Urgent Need For Revolutionizing Economic Statistics

After a busy day at work as a prompt engineer for a marketing agency — working from your laptop in your own living room — it’s time to relax. You scroll through TikTok for a while, and then upload a video about the novel you discovered recently from a Threads post. After ordering dinner through Door

Introducing Noema VI: Paradigm Shifts

When a concept that organizes our reality is replaced by an entirely different and incommensurate worldview, it is called a “paradigm shift.”The theme of this edition of Noema was conceived in early 2024. At that time, we had in mind the epochal shift from the paradigm of globalization, in which mar

The Gulf World That Air Conditioning Wrought

As host-country Qatar took the pitch against Ecuador during the 2022 men’s World Cup opener, machines thrummed in the bowels of Al Bayt Stadium.Outside, it was a humid 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but inside the open-air stadium, the crowd of more than 67,000 fans enjoyed ambient temperatures of about 68

What Searching For Aliens Reveals About Ourselves

As an astrobiologist, I am often teased about my profession. Some people believe that astrobiology is just a catchy buzzword used to garner headlines and secure funding. Others view it as mere science fiction — or worse, a pseudoscience — because it lacks a subject of study. The most common question

Stubborn Interdependence

Amid the swirling confusion over ever-shifting American tariff levels, threats of protectionist countermeasures and talk of imminent global trade wars, it was easy to miss the most significant shift of late in the strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Following the logic of export c